Death is the End of Self
by Nerumi H
Summary: "Once we're on the inside we'll never have to see another one of those bastards again. Or hear them, or… We won't have to find out what it feels like." /GHOST AU. JEANMARCO. Gore.


**.title.: **Death is the End of Self

**.summary.: **"Once we're on the inside we'll never have to see another one of those bastards again. Or hear them, or… We won't have to find out what it feels like."

**.characters.: **Jean Kirschtein/Marco Bodt

**.warnings.: **gore.

**.a/n.:** Written from the kink meme prompt that I can't link because this site is a jerk: _AU where dead people stick around as ghosts, but it's ten times worse because they never move on from who they were before they died, can't process new information, and just kind of hang around and don't even know they're dead. And also look exactly like their corpse at the time of death, that doesn't help._

I had a little trouble grasping the circumstances of the ghosts (especially 'never move on from who they were' and 'can't process new info'; maybe I'm just taking it too literally and strictly), so I hope it worked out anyhow?

Enjoy!

**X**

No one says a word about them.

It's a thankful habit but also a frustrating one, because apparently you can have thousands of dickless giants chewing off people's heads and legends about hills that explode liquid fire but you can't have _ghosts._

Therefore, you don't have someone cracking the code of how to ignore them or how to get rid of them. You don't have tastelessly cute stories about their obliviousness of their own guts spilling out - instead there's the tinny crying that rattles out of their corpses, a noise that crawls around the walls and burrows under your skin. Just a little reminder of what you may hear mixing with the gurgle of your blood when it's time for you to go. No one wants to be blamed for being crazy and hearing it. No one wants to be called a child for being scared of a thing that can't even touch you.

There's a particularly off-putting one that hangs around the rear walls of the study hall, leaning between two carved-out windows with hair soaked in greasy sweat and jaw torn off, gauzy strings of muscle and saliva hanging off his face, and a bristled tremor of a laugh that keeps spewing from the massive teeth marks in his throat. He laughs, and laughs, and retells a poor, incomprehensible quip in a voice mucked and hollow, before he inhales heavily enough to create a sickly sucking noise in the blood stagnating in his throat.

And then laughs again.

After hearing it enough times, over the voices of the professor who pretends he isn't there and through the cabin walls when they do punishment laps around the camp, Jean has decided that that's how he died. The poor bastard died laughing at a joke so pathetic that some Titan played merciful god to the girl he was taunting and ripped out his gullet.

Most of them had died terrified, though, and all the tears they couldn't quite let go in life come spilling out with all the din of a thunderstorm, one that rolls into the hills and blasts back into your head with every hiccup, every nasty squelch of blood that they squeeze out of their wound when they walk or when they try to press away the burning tears. Some of them are stuck on loop, yet some seem nearly coherent, except for their unhinged limbs and ceaseless wanderings.

Whenever Jean notices Marco getting agitated by them - he's picked up a nervous twitch he didn't have when they were thirteen, but it's better than the stress fainting – he'll give the boy a nudge to snap him out of it and say, "Military Police. We're not gonna be them."

Marco will blink; maybe tap a pencil he's holding, or shift his feet, or pretend he's not distracted from his task no way Jean don't worry. His voice will imply otherwise: "What about..."

"Armin's too smart, Mikasa's too fucking good, and Eren's too explosive to let anyone get within a ten foot radius of him."

At that point, Marco will lean into him, maybe, or look down and away and Jean knows they'd be better off just leaving to find a rare corner not reeking of nameless death. But, no matter what, Marco never says thank you. Sometimes Jean will joke that he complimented Eren so he deserves Marco to be okay, but the following nervous chuckle is just as meaningless as that of ghosts themselves. Jean doesn't want to give up on Marco, so he goes back on what he once preached to Eren and ignores his own fears – he's terrified, but he won't let Marco be.

**…**

The night before the official graduation, cabins filled with the fumes of restless sleep and the crackle of trepidation, Jean sits with Marco in the latter's bunk. The burlap-rough sheets are uncomfortably strewn over their entwined legs, uncovered curling toes and knobby ankles moon-pale in the snuffed darkness. They're at first in their usual position of leaning against each other, a sort of mutual support since Jean's too stubborn to be the one draped over Marco but too tired to be the one to hold the other up. But as time patiently ticks by, Jean somehow slides until his head rests on Marco's clavicle and they're both sinking into the wall.

They're not really speaking beyond idle small talk – they feel the discomfort in it, and that in itself is even more uncomfortable, because if there's anyone they've depended on to be at ease with, it's each other.

They're kept awake by the whistling wails of some ghost – it carries into the room, and many tear-glossed eyes open wide in the darkness, but no one says a thing. The years here have let most of them gain the ability to fall asleep with the racket, but with graduation so close, they're all having trouble.

Marco whispers, "As… fun as you making my arm go numb is, shouldn't we go to sleep already?"

The ghoul, somewhere in the camp, sobs and chokes. It cries someone's name, then proceeds to choke on _that_, too. Jean lazily slumps a little further. "We can sleep on the ride to the inner walls."

"You'd rather just sit here?"

"Yeah, I mean…" Jean's mutter drops off, but when another unbearable howl breaks in through the wooden foundations and both he and Marco flinch, he tacks on, "Once we're on the inside we'll never have to see another one of those bastards again."

Marco doesn't reply at first, and runs his hand up Jean's arm with the poor excuse of rubbing his own eyes. A soft exhale blurs past the top of Jean's ear.

"Or hear them, or…"

Someone rolls over in their rickety bunk. The ghoul has gone quiet, but they know it can't be for long.

He concludes, "We won't have to find out what it feels like."

Marco lowers his hand and, this time, is far more obvious about the way his slender fingers brush down Jean's elbow, gingerly circling into the tendons of his wrist. His chin lowers so his breath instead whispers against Jean's cheek, and the other surreptitiously finds himself sinking further into the blankets.

Marco murmurs, "I think we'll be alright."

Jean tightly smirks. "Your predictable optimism's appreciated, resident ball of sunshine."

"I mean it. You'll be fine."

"I said that, didn't I? I know." Between them, he allows himself the entwining of their fingers, until their palms press together and he can feel Marco's heartbeat in his chest beneath his ear and let's himself think for a betraying second that he will forever get this chance, and he's comfortable in the barest of touches, just for another day. "I know, Marco."

**…**

Jean sits in the back of the shambled cart, the knobs of his spine knocking into the slatted walls, and his breath fogging under a muffler into sticky moisture that clings to his jaw. And he keeps panting, the heat overwhelming, the taste of ash at least slightly better than the stench of blood and Titan's acidic saliva.

Body bags are piled like firewood. Sludgy black blood paints some of the dark green fabrics, leaking from an unknown lesion, an unknown person.

Jean is already seeing them walk the streets.

A hoard unpeel themselves from blood splatters and the steaming flesh of Titans, missing limbs or gear smashed or entrails sweeping along the sidewalk like wet snakes. Jean draws himself further from the bags as, one by one, they begin to practically _glow_ – the illusion is only the dirty glisten of ghosts pulling themselves from the binds of human flesh and whatever beautiful, deserved silence there is after death. They pour from the cart, feeling no impact when they jump out the back and hit the ground. Some don't even leave the cart. They all look around in frantic fear of something that isn't coming for them anymore.

And they cry each other's names, but none of them turn to listen.

Jean's eyes burn as if with smoke, and he lowers his head into his knees. He knows there is only so far that he can run, so many walls he can pass; there is now a new ghost to join the legion that curse the trainee grounds and the city itself.

He isn't surprised when he hears it – he plugs his ears too late, and what comes bleeding in is a sickening tremor, a cavity rusting away the soft comfort of a voice he knew in every tone and every broken splinter but not _this_, nothing like this, the starved gasping that says, once, twice, panicked, hopeless, _"Jean."_

Pathetic, he presses his gloved palms hard into his ears. A part of him wants him to look back up – maybe that voice was closer than he thought, more relieved than he thought, more _alive_. Maybe he's going to get a squeeze on the shoulder and then be pulled up, told he's slowing down the cart with the extra weight, and don't worry, and we'll walk it off together and you'll sleep fine tonight, Jean.

The part of him that believes that, however, is furious. It monopolizes his reflexes and all at once, in some manic, heartrending overthrow of his senses, it bombards Jean with every fleeting should-have-said and times he never turned and looked at him when he could: the delicate gossamers of misplaced gallantry and honesty that sewed together a kid with swarthy skin, too many freckles to count, a smile to forge ignorant bliss out of misery and the… deepened wick of a distressed grimace bleeding into a bloodless pallor.

He only realizes he's looking up when Marco turns in the ruined street, and he's a tapestry unraveled, shorn thread hanging in strips of clothing and flesh down his side. His skull is partially collapsed around a hollowed eye socket. The dropping sun shines blindingly through the curved strokes of his ribs, illuminating his fog-thin figure as the cart rides further away, until Jean's gaze blurs around the final image of his dearest friend's uncomprehending smile in free-fall.

**…**

When they get back to the base, everyone's eyes are glassed over but they all either stare long and hard at each other or avoid looking at all. It's to see who is real and who they will walk right through – Jean knows, because he's doing it, too.

That night, fires are set over the deceased: three bright beacons topped with greasy smoke, sparks spitting around stagnant fluids and final horrified breaths. They're a symbol of gratitude for the indefinable dent in the Titan's population that the fallen soldiers left behind, a dignified farewell, and gradually, like moths, the ghosts flood the grounds with their meaningful gaits reflecting what they lost in life.

Two shards of bone pinch in his hand.

Jean can't help thinking, it's his own fault they stand here and their decisions are compromised by the fear of death and the fear of loyalty - his fault that it's a certain name sizzling weakly behind everyone's lips, a name he's scared to say for the possibility of it summoning him again.

The palpable horror of those passed swallow up Jean's resolution – the survey corps can have him if the power of such a chain with their emblem cast across their backs like shields can protect him from remembering.

A weak person he may be, certainly. But he understands less why he is alive with such a title cast upon him, while the others are dead – even less than he understands why it's the name of the recon corps that won't shake its way out of his will. And how, how the _hell_, the light can sink so fast on the watery silhouette that appears on his right side and hovers there - the humbly proud curve in his stance draws Jean's eyes over again.

The temptation to see him one last time is strong, and he doesn't understand that, either.

His name falls from Jean's lips - the growing howls incinerate whatever hope, terror, relief it is that swaddles the word until it's only a bare whisper of what he'd tricked himself into thinking he would have the chance to say forever.

Marco doesn't turn.

Jean stares at the familiar sweep of black hair that now drops off into the shadowed cavern of a skull. His nose is newly crooked, cutting oddly against the backdrop of flame, his lips pulled back in a sneer that isn't even a fraction of what expressions Marco has ever shown him. Burst and broken intestines stew steaming blood around the cup of his pale hips.

His single good eye rolls up in its socket, cracked-open head showing the frayed tugging of muscle behind his yellowing eye so it can stare just past the fires to an invisible sentry. Marco lifts his one arm and it bends behind his torso - a fist beats singularly against his back, but there isn't a hand to clasp over his heart in this futile salute.

Bile floods over Jean's tongue and he has to clasp his free hand over his mouth to steel himself to swallow.

"You'll be alright," Marco breathes.

Marco's arm abruptly falls and his head snaps around to stare at something behind him - the torn lung catches in the roll of firelight as his breathing picks up.

Seeing him scared…it snaps something in Jean, his sanity, his security, because Marco may be dead and gone and had fallen into the shatters of his crumbled spine when they loaded him into the cart, but here's here and moving again with that klutzy salute and – Jean can't let him be scared anymore.

Jean whispers, "Marco, you're fine."

But his dark eye caves open wider, chin up, body solid except for the restless heaving of his pant; suddenly Jean can imagine it, and he's dreading it all over again.

"Hey." Jean shifts in front of him, but doesn't even get a glance in return – instead, Marco's terrified expression deepens, the lightning strike fissure in his face twisting weakly in the stammered, heroic righting of himself that he tries to assume. Jean's stomach lurches. He knows this is where he left with Marco's sacrifice earning him minutes that he would rather die than betray. And Marco was alone in the collapsing streets, to die mute and unprotected.

He gasps, "Marco, you're fine!"

Marco's head lowers an inch. He whispers, in a way so hurried and earnest it's as if he doesn't want to be heard, "Jean, be safe, please."

"I am! I'm here! I'm ali - " He can't be ignored, screaming into a black void, with the chance at an answer so close - he wants to be looked at again, spoken to. Jean's hand snaps forwards to grab his shoulder to knock him out of it, but Marco begins to turn and his fingers desperately sluice through air. Jean gasps, "Marco, listen to me!"

His words fall straight through him, their only impact the growing shake in the bottom lip Marco tucks between his teeth – Marco scuffs forwards, gait unmarred by the blood sloshing down his leg; he stares behind him once more, his silence cutting deeper than the resounding torturous howls, muscles contracting in his throat around words he maybe never got the chance to say, and body twitching with the infinite escape he never earned.

Jean's skin is burning with both the fire and the empty beat of his blood right under the surface, and when Marco turns around so his intact side faces him, the simmering terror in that once so familiar face makes all the fury die in Jean's throat. Marco will have him forever, now, and be terrified for a peace that Jean has already stolen from him to let himself life – a death displaced for another morning, another day, a moment void of the sacrifices heroes die for and just a poor accident or a suicide with convenient blame.

Marco has died in exchange for an eternity of being more scared than he ever was in life, and for Jean to be broken too.

"Don't die for something like that…"

His breath comes hoarse, but cuts off abruptly when someone takes his shoulder – Jean's suddenly too exhausted to jump, too tired to retort against the words that are said to him: "Jean, they can't hear you."

He only manages to breathe, "He can't..."

"He can't hear you."

The hand falls off of his shoulder, and Marco vanishes into the fire.


End file.
